Incidents commonly occur in health care facilities. For example, an incident may be a patient fall or a medication administration error. Incidents may relate to a wide range of activities that occur in health care facilities such as parking complaints, patient feedback, employee feedback, and the level of care provided at the health care facility.
An incident may involve a number of different people within the healthcare facility. For example, an incident may include doctors, nurses, patients, a patient's family members and administrators.
Typically, when an incident is recognized it is eventually reported to an administrator of the health care facility. The administrator may follow-up to inquire about the status of the incident, update any incident information and assign tasks to other workers in an attempt to resolve any outstanding issues related to the incident.
An administrator may use a health care incident management database to store data relating to incidents within a health care facility. Known health care incident management databases are based on a static set of data fields for storing data relating to the incident. This static set of data fields limits the number of data types available to the administrator. For example, the static set of fields may include only date of birth, name, weight, and height. An administrator may want to store a specific type of data in the health care incident management database that is not supported by the static set of data fields.
Administrators of such systems are left to re-task a data field in the static set of data fields. For example, if the administrator wanted to enter the date of the incident into the health care incident management database but only the data of birth was supported by the static set of data fields, then the administrator would re-task the date of birth data field to also store data values relating to the date of the incident. Re-tasking defined data fields may be problematic as the database would not distinguish between a data value that relates to the date of birth and a data value that relates to the date of the incident. This may lead to inefficiencies and errors in data storage, consolidation and comparison.